NieR: Automata, 2017's JRPG hit, is receiving an anime series in celebration of its fifth anniversary. NieR: Automata is loved by fans for its over-the-top action and larger-than-life set pieces, but also for its bleak story and complex lore that takes multiple playthroughs to even begin to understand. As a result, the NieR: Automata anime has some high expectations to meet.
Video games and anime seem like a match made in heaven — playing through the adventures of an anime, or conversely watching gaming icons in an animated series, is always a treat for the fans. However, the relationship between the two mediums is not always a clean one. Translating video games to anime, or vice versa, usually results in some problems. NieR: Automata's anime has some hurdles to overcome, and will hopefully buck the trend to succeed.
The Problems When Moving Between Video Games and Anime
There are many potential issues that arise when translating IPs between games and anime. Maybe a video game's story is not as interesting when it is not supported by gameplay, or maybe anime games are not as highly polished or mechanically interesting compared to other games on the market. More often than not, the largest problems come down to pacing.
For instance, One Piece Pirate Warriors 4 heavily abridges the 1000+ episode series into a mindless beat-em-up — its story is impossible to follow without prior knowledge of the series. A good solution is to create an original story based within the anime's world, like another game in the series, One Piece: World Seeker. This solution only works when bringing anime to game, though. Fans are expecting a faithful recreation of NieR: Automata, so an original story would not cut it.
Anime series based on video games heavily suffer from pacing issues as well. Persona 5 is typically a massive 80-100 hour game, but the Persona 5 anime series had to truncate the whole story into a mere 28 episodes. While 28 is still a large episode count, many of the smaller but important story details were lost. It is a concern that NieR: Automata will suffer the same fate.
While not nearly as long as Persona, the game still takes around 40 hours to complete — not to mention that it is a sequel to 2010's NieR, which is about the same length and is vital to understanding the full story. Arguably, the world of NieR is more complex than Persona's , so fitting it all into an anime series is a mammoth undertaking.
The Two Sides of NieR: Automata
NieR: Automata is a hard game to classify. One can look at it as an over the top, action packed adventure, with combat as intricate now as when it released in 2017. Someone else can view Automata solely as a tragic story — a commentary on today's world where the main characters deal with issues darker than what most other games cover. In order to be successful, the anime will have to perfectly balance both sides of the game. Lean too far into the action, and fans will demand more story. Too much story and viewers will demand more action and complain of slow pacing.
Whatever the case may be, longtime fans of NieR will have to make their final judgments when the show releases. Hopefully the task is not as impossible as it seems, and the anime lives up to its lauded NieR name.
NieR: Automata is available now on PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.